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Wednesday, May 11, 2011

A twitter thread with an anti-Zionist who hated my posters

One such hater is someone named Ben White, who apparently is one of the leaders of the anti-Israel crowd. He wrote a book called "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide" and has been praised by the usual crowd of anti-Zionists like Ali Abunimah and Ilan Pappe.

His reaction to my posters was to put up his own spoof poster on Twitter, replacing "Zionism" with "Hasbara" and tweeting "Israel at 63: This is Hasbara!":

Not having ever heard of him, I thought this was a compliment, because I thinkit is a very good example of what hasbara should be. Only when MargieInTelAviv responded

He then tried to change the subject, with a photo that I suppose is meant to illustrate Zionist evil. Which is the usual modus operandi of people like him - they need to change the playing field in order to pretend to win.

But think about his main argument: he believes that when Israel - or in this case, ordinary Israelis - do good things, they have an ulterior motive: to cover up crimes. And when people like me publicize how great Israel is, we also have an evil motive: to cover up Israel's crimes.

In other words, to these mental midgets, Israel is inherently evil. Everything it does is evil. This is the premise that informs all of their activities. No shades of grey, no nuance, not even the possibility of admitting that things are more complex than they pretend. When Israel does something seemingly bad, it proves it is evil, when it does something good, it's just more proof that it is evil.

Logical people, who make up their minds based on evidence, can look at both sides of a story and decide. Haters, however, already know the answer, and any evidence to the contrary they use to "prove" their own point!

Let's once again look at the oppressed Palestinian Arab cancer patients who enjoyed a day in the snow courtesy of the IDF, the subject of my first poster:

Looking at these photos drives the haters crazy, as we have seen. They cannot reconcile the idea of Israelis - especially Israeli soldiers - actually doing something nice for the people they supposedly despise and who are, they believe, being ethnically cleansed by the very same soldiers. The cognitive dissonance must be painful. They must therefore invent their own elaborate frameworks of bizarre conspiracy theories to reconcile the obvious truth about Israel with their own, twisted, hate.

How can oppressed Palestinian Arab kids allow themselves to be used as pawns by the evil IDF? How dare they laugh and smile and have fun with the symbols of Zionist atrocities? Better that they refuse to go sleddign in Mount Hermon, and stay in their hospitals, than go and have fun when there is a slight chance that someone might photograph them and use them in such a terrible evil hasbaristic way! Don't they see that they are exactly like the Jews in Theresienstadt before the Red Cross visited it in 1944? Their smiles are lies! Their fun is a lie! The pictures are probably Photoshopped! The IDF was probably mowing them down with machine guns!

There is an entire industry out there, with people who are emotionally - and, in this case, financially - invested in demonizing Israel. Showing the truth is a direct threat to their worldview, and for them, this cannot be allowed. To them, Israel is a uniquely evil entity that must be destroyed, and tons of solid evidence showing that they are completely, irrevocably wrong is simply something else that they must do battle with their only weapon: lies.

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